Unlike most industry trade groups or alliances that are vendor driven or centric, ODCA is consortium of global IT leaders (e.g. customers) that is vendor independent and comprises as 12 member steering committee from member companies (e.g. customers), learn more about ODCA here.

The documents detail expectations for market delivery to the organizations mission of open, industry standard cloud solution adoption, and discussions have already begun with providers to help accelerate delivery of solutions based on these new requirements. This suite of requirements was joined by a Best Practices document from National Australia Bank (NAB) outlining carbon footprint reductions in cloud computing. NAB’s paper illustrates their leadership in innovative methods to report carbon emissions in the cloud and aligns their best practices to underlying Alliance requirements. All of these documents are available in the ODCA Documents Library.

The PaaS interoperability usage model outlines requirements for rapid application deployment, application scalability, application migration and business continuity. The SaaS interoperability usage model makes applications available on demand, and encourages consistent mechanisms, enabling cloud subscribers to efficiently consume SaaS via standard interactions. In concert with these usage models, the Alliance published the ODCA Guide to Interoperability, which describes proposed requirements for interoperability, portability and interconnectivity. The documents are designed to ensure that companies are able to move workloads across clouds.

It is great to see IT customer driven or centric groups step and actually deliver content and material to help their peers, or in some cases competitors that compliments information provided by vendors and vendor driven trade groups.

As with technologies, tools and services that often are seen as competitive, a mistake would be viewing ODCA as or in competition with other industry trade groups and organizations or vise versa. Rather, IT organizations and vendors can and should leverage the different content from the various sources. This is an opportunity for example vendors to learn more about what the customers are thinking or concerned about as opposed to telling IT organizations what to be looking at and vise versa.

Granted some marketing organizations or even trade groups may not like that and view groups such as ODCA as giving away control of who decides what is best for them. Smart vendors, vars, business partners, consultants and advisors are and will leverage material and resources such as ODCA, and likewise, groups like ODCA are open to including a diverse membership unlike some pay to play industry vendor centric trade groups. If you are a vendor, var or business partner, don’t look at ODCA as a threat, instead, explore how your customers or prospects may be involved with, or using ODCA material and leverage that as a differentiator between you and your competitor.